*
“Hey, Mama? I’m going out tonight, okay?” Lydia scraped at a soggy vanilla wafer in her dish of banana pudding.
“Going where?”
“To the preseason game with one of my sorors. I can give you her number so you can talk to her.”
There were the three of us that night. Two sisters and a mother at the table, lingering. We used our spoons to pick at the remains of our dessert. We were full, but sugar beckoned.
“No, I don’t think so. Coco’s not here to chaperone.” Mama rose from the table and when she returned from the kitchen, she carried foil. She covered the pudding dish, pressing around the edges.
“So no, just like that?”
“You need to be studying.”
“I can go out on a Saturday night if I want to. I’m almost twenty-two years old, Mama.”
My mother turned to me. “Ailey, if you don’t stop looking in grown folks’ mouths when they’re talking. Go do your homework.”
“I did it yesterday. I’m finished.”
“Ailey Pearl Garfield, did you hear what I said? I’m not playing with you!”
Upstairs, I lay on my big sister’s bed, reading. On the transistor radio, the preseason game was on: Mecca was losing to Albany State: “And it’s GOOD!”
I was dozing, when I felt Lydia lie down beside me. We moved into our old position, my head resting against her feet.
“Lydia, where’s Dante?”
“You can’t tell anybody I told you. It has to be our secret. Do you promise, Ailey?”
She nudged at me until I sat up. I promised her and she told me she’d gotten in trouble last year. She’d been hanging out with a bad crew and, well, she’d started using drugs.
“For real?” I looked down at her comforter, focusing on the seashells and waves. I didn’t want her to see my face. The shock there and the disappointment. I didn’t want her to be ashamed.
“That’s why Mama came south to see about me. She put me in a rehab center so I could get better. So I could get off the drugs.”
“But what about Dante? You still didn’t tell me what happened with y’all.”
“We broke up. We’re not together anymore.”
“But, like, maybe y’all can get back together. If you had a fight, you could say you’re sorry and he could say he’s sorry—”
“No, baby. That’s over.”
“Oh. Okay. Are you sad?”
“Yeah, baby, I am. I’m real, real sad. That’s why I don’t want to talk about Dante. It just makes me want to cry.”
Lydia had told me a serious secret; it was only right that I offered one in return. For seconds, I considered telling her about Gandee, what he had done to me in the bathtub when I was little. How he’d threatened to kill my sisters and mother, and then me, if I ever told anybody. And even though Lydia was my best friend, she was like a second mother to me. I didn’t want Lydia to think less of me, to decide that Gandee had made me something other than the good girl she thought I was.
Instead, I confessed to Lydia about Chris. That I’d been meeting him behind the upper school on the days I told Mama that I was studying late. He already had a girlfriend, and I knew I should feel guilty that he was two-timing, but I didn’t. Because Amber was that white girl in my class that I’d told Lydia about, the one who flipped her hair on my desk.
“You don’t have anything to feel sorry for,” Lydia said. “I mean, no, it’s not the best situation, but be honest. He probably was with that white girl because there weren’t any Black girls. At least not any who don’t have jacked-up perms. Remember how Coco used to complain about that school? There weren’t but six Black kids there.”
“It’s thirteen of us now.”
“Whoa-dee-whoa, look at all them Negroes! Thirteen is a race riot!”
I laughed and touched her hand. “You so silly, Lydia!”
“Baby, think about it. That Chris guy just wants a girlfriend who looks like him, and then here you come, all beautiful and brown and super cool. And you know how to fix your hair. How could he resist all this?”
Lydia waved her hands at me, like I had a superpower. She made me sound so interesting, like one of the characters in her favorite book. I laid my head back down on her feet and listened to the game. Mecca had scored a touchdown. Our side was starting to win.
Permission to Be Excused
Coco looked like she had cancer. That’s what Mama said when my sister let herself in, dragging her suitcase behind her. It was a Friday in mid-October, the first weekend of fall break. Our mother ran and hugged her, then chastised Coco for taking a taxicab from the train station.